NASA awards students’ trial balloons

Most high-school students don’t get to send their class experiments into outer space, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sent four projects into the stratosphere on weather balloons to test theories. The winning project in the Balloonsat High Altitude Flight Competition, submitted by the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, N.C., demonstrated radiation shielding using polyvinyl alcohol films. “This team won because they combined a variety of techniques and information sources to look for radiation effects,” says David Snyder, NASA’s technical leader for the Balloonsat project. The four projects are described here.